


cigarettes in pocket

by blushingsweet (sunflowered)



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Homesickness, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-13
Updated: 2018-04-13
Packaged: 2019-04-22 11:08:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14307375
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunflowered/pseuds/blushingsweet
Summary: Whatever home was, Sasha couldn't find it in North America.





	cigarettes in pocket

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Catznetsov](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catznetsov/gifts).



> hello g. while u were missing i did this.

Sasha makes his excuses at the bar.

It’s crowded outside: crawling with cars, people, tall buildings; Sasha had declined his share of drink, but accepted whatever food the team pushed his way: grease and meat and oil. All of it was thick, and nothing like anything Sasha wanted to eat, but he hadn’t needed to pay for it, and Sasha wasn’t going to start complaining about food, not now.

He shoves a cigarette into his mouth. Where’s his lighter? Maybe Sanja was right and he had to start bringing two, here on out; he’s loathe to go back inside for it, left sitting at the table where he was. He feels too clogged up, distantly, underneath the tall neon lights, the car honks, stark in his brain and dimming him out. Sasha doesn’t know how Sanja does it; afloat after all this burying, even if he grew up different.

Nicky comes out, though, through the back door. He’s so pale in his light sombreness, Sasha’s lighter in hand, edging up to him tentative and beautiful and cautious. It makes Sasha want to calm him; like Nicky’s a stray, wild animal who’s gotten himself lost around the city and needs someone to love him. He looks so distinct, here in North America, standing out like a sore thumb.

Nicky offers his lighter back, like it’s something precious. Sasha smiles at him; he’s so nervous, look at him, all ready to hide his hands in his pockets for not knowing what to say.

Sasha jerks his head towards the pavement, and Nicky nods at him, determined, watching Sasha light his cigarette.

“Okay?” Sasha asks around it, blurry, the first thing he’s said in hours, maybe; despite Sanja trying to pull more out of him, to start walking.

Nicky’s glancing up at the skyline, watchful like a deer, like if he stared hard enough the billboards will either turn Swedish or be legible. He shrugs at Sasha, and then he looks down, all boyish and dreamy in the bleak lights of the city. “Tired,” he says, and then stops saying anything; just looks back at him.

“Okay,” Sasha says, needlessly, and then refocuses on the way ahead: if they don’t veer away too much, they should be able to make it back to the hotel okay, and Sasha can kick Greenie out to fall asleep holding him for once; Nicky looks like he needs it.

 

::

 

Sasha wants to ask Nicky a lot of things: does he mind the smell of the smoke? Does he relish the lingering foreignness about him; does he want to try some of Sasha’s cigarette? Snus is quiet and all individualistic, but Sasha never had anyone to smoke with; no one to light his tobacco, no one to offer a spare.

Nicky’s stepping over the rain puddles, gingerly, when Sasha looks away from the cigarette in his hand. He’s almost a painting—this untouchable person he gets to love for a brief second, if he wanted to, in this space marked out by little pillars of smoke that go nowhere. A few hours ago they were hockey players, and now just—displaced foreigners, alone with their complacency; unable to speak the local language, even if they knew how to sound the words.

Nicky’s trying to read the signs, still—Sasha knows half the language, but he’s stopped bothering as much when Sanja came, lazy about it. Now he reads nothing but Russian, little paperbacks that meant nothing to nobody. Little pockets to share his homesickness.

“Tired?” Sasha asks.

Nicky looks at him, obstinate, nearly glowing in front of a corner shop. The lights reflect on his hair, his skin, turning everything green, orange, red. Everything behind them keeps blurring and blurring; like an amalgamation of America.

“Maybe,” Nicky allows, and ducks his head to shove another pouch of snus into his upper lip. Sasha wants to laugh at his discretion, but instead he puts out the cigarette, discards it, lights another. Nicky is watching him, stopped with him in the middle of everything, his pale eyelashes glinting.

“I don’t know how difficult this is for you,” says Sasha, softly, watching Nicky track the sounds from his lips, clueless. He looks fine with not understanding, for once. Bleakly, Sasha hopes that Nicky would be fine with never understanding him; with being sure enough of Sasha that he would never have to explain himself. “Maybe you’ll be better at this than me, one day.”

Nicky says something at him, then reaches his hand out. For a moment his hand is outstretched between the both of them, caught in a silent storm, like fresh snow, until Nicky makes a noise at the back of his throat and reaches into Sasha’s pocket to find Sasha’s hand, skin freezing, _oh_.

Sasha threads their fingers together; of course he does. How does anyone say no to him? Nicky looked—if you asked Sasha—like he was about to break from contemplation, all the time. Selfishly, all Sasha wanted to do was to remove him from his own head: he looked trapped in it, sometimes, and it made Sasha drag him to IKEA, for his lack of options. One day he’ll ask Nylander, maybe, if he’s brave enough, for any little Swedish haunts that must exist in D.C..

Nicky’s blushing, stubbornly meeting his gaze. How ridiculous, Sasha thinks, that Nicky wouldn’t think twice about fucking him, but is shy on this, that Sasha could hurt him, even in the most minute, careless ways.

“Like you,” teases Sasha, just to see him glare, a little bit, and then avert his gaze, reddening further. “So quiet.”

Nicky makes a small noise at the back of his throat, and then squeezes Sasha’s hand tighter. Who could say if his silence was born from not knowing how to speak to Sasha? He didn’t mind, in any case; here was how Nicky existed, and for now, he either didn’t have the words, or didn’t want to speak them. Sasha leaves the cigarette in his mouth, and with his free hand, reaches up to tuck one of Nicky’s stray curls behind his ear. Sasha remembers being three years younger. He was a mess, too, but never as beautifully as Nicky, never self-contained and ready to close in on himself, to stay watchful in a room.

“Like you too,” says Nicklas, after a little while, digging his heels into the concrete.

Sasha nudges him to the side, suddenly aware that they’ve been standing in the middle of the pavement, though no one’s passing them even when the city is flecked with people. Sasha would never be used to this, really, the huge congregation of a crowd, of these masses of people walking from point to point.

He came from someplace quieter. Some place that didn’t love hockey quite as much as he did; though… in some ways he did wish he never had to leave. No one is seeing through him in this strange land, not like they would a thousand small countries away. No one will know him, not here, not Nicky, not even Sanja, even if he is past needing people to do that.

Sasha takes their connected hands out of his pocket. Their hands warm against the very mild coldness, the city air: exhaust and cigarette smoke and faint dirtiness. Sasha feels bathed in it, this strangeness, standing by a road as the cars fade in and out beside them. For a brief minute he thinks about slotting neatly inside this dream of North American hockey: the right words, ugly skating, the driving of oneself into the ground. Snus instead of cigarette smoke. The wealthy abundance from having everything.

The overhead lights shift and melt into other colours; still tinting Nicky as Sasha watches him, smoke ghostly in the air between them: red, white, blue. It’s loud; there’s an incessant buzzing, a thrumming that doesn’t let up even in Sasha’s head when he tries to block out the sound. Nicky’s breathing shallowly, letting himself be watched, until he scrunches his nose grumpily and looks upwards—it’s snowing.  

“Hmm,” says Nicky, before he drops into easy Swedish, glancing at Sasha with a smile. It’s not the same smile as when Sasha had first pressed against him in bed, the one that he gives easily if you tickle him when he expects to be kissed. It’s different somehow. Newer: something Nicky hasn’t thought about in a long time. You could see it in him, really. In the eyes somehow, even if Sasha isn’t at all interested in reading Nicky. Some things you just knew, from some distant, common land of being alien.

 

::

 

There are so many things Sasha is unsure about: camaraderie, easy smiles, small talk at the supermarket. Standing someplace he doesn’t want to be. The assurance of lighters sold in bulk, its quick convenience, in reach if you wanted it. The simplicity, its pleasantness, the easygoingness of everything. It’s easy to be someone here.

“What… thinking?” Nicklas asks, voice rusty. He’s tired; eyes drooping, even if he’ll never admit it. Sasha wants to press kisses into the corners of his eyes forever; he looks young, at this age that Sasha would never be again. He is almost envious. “You…”

“Nothing,” interrupts Sasha, before he realises. He smiles wanly at him. “Just sad.”

“Angry?” asks Nicky.

“Little bit,” Sasha admits, running a hand through his hair. “At me.”

“Okay,” says Nicky, and plucks the cigarette out of Sasha’s mouth to kiss him. He’s chilled all over, solid, one cold hand at the back of his neck. Sasha really does want to keep him, then, dusty with snow, ice melting all over him. He even tastes cold. He tastes like tobacco.

“Sorry,” says Nicky, when he pulls away from Sasha’s mouth, washed-out in harsh lighting.

“It’s okay,” Sasha smiles, in the middle of Lower Manhattan, even if he will have to wake up in the morning and feel this way all over again. What’s a dream if not unrealistic? Sasha reaches out with his empty hand to cup Nicky’s cheek, feeling him lean into it, crisp and sharp and unfamiliar. “We go home, try again.”

**Author's Note:**

> one day i will learn to not finish writing my fics at 3.30am or so in the morning, but this is not that day.
> 
> i am yelling on [tumblr](https://kuznetso.tumblr.com/) or [twitter](https://twitter.com/blushingsweet) everyday, so please come and yell with me about russian hockeys, if that's your thing!


End file.
